(1) Field of the Invention
This invention concerns a pulse regeneration system for sampling and remotely transmitting a number of asynchronous pulses and more particularly concerns a technique for transmission of these pulses on a fixed rate communication channel without introducing variations in the timing of the state transistions represented by these pulses due to delays encountered in buffering.
(2) Description of the Prior Art
The problem of transmitting messages of a number of sources can easily be solved by utilizing a multiplicity of sending and receiving instruments. Each particular source may have a unique sending and receiving instrument associated with it. Since, sending and receiving instruments such as a pair of data sets are expensive, the above solution in prohibited. In addition, the high cost of telephone lines to connect the multiplicity of data set pairs together, requires that there be a high percentage of utilization of the transmission equipment and each telephone line.
In U.S. Pat. No. 3,535,450 issued on Oct. 20, 1970 to W. Vollmeyer, a method for transmitting a plurality of coded messages in time multiplex manner is shown. Notification of a change in the binary state of a pulse source associated with the time multiplex system is transmitted in response to the transmission of a synchronization pulse that immediately follows a modulation condition change in the pulse source that corresponds to the change in its binary state.
It is frequently desired to scan a number of data sources, which exhibit binary state transitions. For example, these binary state changes may result from telephone trunks or subscriber stations going off-hook, on-hook, sending dial pulses or ticketing and metering pulses, which occur at random. Additionally, it may be desired to transmit these binary state transitions to a remote point via a common data channel of fixed capacity in such a way as to permit an image of the individual binary state changes to be reconstructed without timing distortion. Accordingly, it is the object of the present invention to provide an apparatus and method whereby binary state changes from a number of asynchronous pulse sources may be sampled, multiplexed and enqueued for transmission over a common data channel of fixed rate without introducing variations in the timing of the binary state changes due to variations in queuing delays.